The robot watched as Shikhar Bahl opened there frigerator door. It recorded his movements, the swing of the door and more，analyzing this data and readying itself to imitate（模仿）what Bahl had done. It failed at first, missing the handle completely at times, grabbing it in the wrong spot or pulling it incorrectly. But after a few hours of practice, the robot succeeded and opened the door.

"Imitation is a great way to learn, "said Bahl, a Ph. D. student at the Robotics Institute (RI) in Carnegie Mellon University. " Having robots actually learn from directly watching humans remains an unsolved problem in the field, but this work takes a significant step in enabling that ability."

Bahl worked with Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta, both faculty members in the RI, to develop a new learning method for robots called WHIRL, short for In-the-Wild Human Imitating Robot Learning. WHIRL is an efficient computation program for visual imitation. People constantly perform various tasks in their homes. With WHIRL, a robot can observe those tasks, gather the video data it needs and then go about practicing and learning to accomplish the tasks on its own.

The team added a camera and their software to an off-the-shelf robot, and it learned how to do more than 20 tasks—from opening and closing appliances, cabinet doors and drawers to putting a lid on a pot, pushing in a chair and even taking a garbage bag out of the bin.

Current method for teaching a robot a task typically relies on reinforcement (强化) learning. In reinforcement learning, the robot is typically trained on millions of examples in imitation and then asked to adapt that training to the real world.

This learning model works well when teaching a robot a single task in a structured environment, but it is difficult to extend and deploy (调动). WHIRL can learn from any video of a human doing a task. It is capable of being easily expanded, not limited to one specific task and can operate in realistic home environments.

Poet Wadsworth Longfellow said "music is the universal language of mankind", and there's growing evidence that he was right. New research shows people with Alzheimer's (老年痴呆) disease often respond to familiar music or song lyrics, even when their memories and ability to participate in conversation may be flagging.

Jonathan Graff-Radford, Doctor of Medicine, explains on The Mayo Clinic website why this may be:" Musical memories are often preserved in Alzheimer's patients because key brain areas linked to musical memory are relatively undamaged by the disease. "

When English senior Ted McDermott was diagnosed with Alzheimer in 2016, his son Simon McDermott found Ted became verbally and physically violent as the disease progressed. Grateful for the resources provided by the Alzheimer's Society, Simon and 80-year-old Ted made videos of their daily car duets (二重唱) for a fundraising ''Singing for the Brain" program in 2019. Truly remarkable, considering that some days Ted didn't recognize Simon.

The songs brought them to the attention of the public. In just a few months their efforts had considerable success on YouTube, raising over &100, 000, and resulting in a contract with Decca Records for 80-year-old Ted. Although Ted has begun to decline a little in the last years, he always remembers the words to his favorite songs and is happy to go with Simon daily in the car to sing. Different music-related programs and projects are offered by the U. K. Alzheimer's Society organizations. These programs are designed for people with Alzheimer to provide mental stimulation in a supportive social environment.

Social engagement and keeping your brain active, along with a healthy diet and exercising, may seem like obvious good habits to follow for your health in general. They've also been proven to be factors in reducing the risk of developing Alzheimer.

It's never too late to start taking care of your body and your brain—so make music appreciation or singing part of the routine of your loved one struggling with Alzheimer. As William Shakespeare said, "If music be the food of love, play on."

According to the majority of Americans, women are every bit as capable of being good political leaders as men. The same can be said of their ability to dominate the corporate boardroom. And according to a new Pew Research Center survey on women and leadership, most Americans find women indistinguishable from men on key leadership traits such as intelligence and capacity for innovation, with many saying they're stronger than men in terms of being passionate and organized leaders.

So why, then, are women in short supply at the top of government and business in the United States? According to the public, at least, it's not that they lack toughness, management talent or proper skill sets.

It's also not all about work-life balance. Although economic research and previous survey findings have shown that career interruptions related to motherhood may make it harder for women to advance in their careers and compete for top executive (领导层) jobs, relatively few adults in the recent survey point to this as a key barrier for women seeking leadership roles. Only about one-in-five say women's family responsibilities are a major reason why there aren't more females in top leadership positions in business and politics.

Instead, topping the list of reasons, about four-in-ten Americans point to a double standard for women seeking to climb to the highest levels of either politics or business, where they have to do more than their male counterparts to prove themselves. Similar shares say the electorate (选民) and corporate America are just not ready to put more women in top leadership positions.

As a result, the public is divided about whether the imbalance in corporate America will change in the foreseeable future, even though women have made major advances in the workplace. While 53% believe men will continue to hold more top executive positions in business in the future, 44% say it's only a matter of time before as many women are in top executive positions as men. Americans are less doubtful when it comes to politics: 73% expect to see a female president in their lifetime.

Do you play video games? If so, you aren't alone. Video games are becoming more common and are increasingly enjoyed by adults. The average age of gamers has been increasing and was estimated to be 35 in 2016. Changing technology also means that more people are exposed to video games. A new breed of casual gamers has come, who play on smart phones and tablets at spare moments throughout the day. But do they have any effect on our brains and behavior?

Over the years, the media have made various claims about video games and their effect on our health and happiness. "Games have sometimes been praised or demonized, often without real data backing up those claims. Moreover, gaming is a popular activity, so everyone seems to have strong opinions on the topic", says Marc Palaus, who with his colleagues wanted to see if any trends had appeared from the research to date concerning how video games affect the structure and activity of our brains. They collected the results from 116 scientific studies, 22 of which looked at structural changes in the brain and 100 of which looked at changes in brain functionality and behavior.

The studies show that playing video games can change how our brains perform; and even their structure. For example, playing video games affects our attention, and some studies found that gamers show improvements in several types of attention, such as sustained attention or selective attention. Video games can also be addictive, and this kind of addiction is called "Internet gaming disorder". Researchers have found functional and structural changes in the neural (神经的) reward system in gaming addicts. These neural changes are basically the same as those seen in other addictive disorders.

So, what do all these brain changes mean? "We focused on how the brain reacts to video game exposure, but these effects do not always translate to real-life changes," says Palaus. As video games are still quite new, the research into their effects is still in its babyhood.

A Pittsburgh-based robotics and engineering startup recently make Moonwalkers public, a pair of battery-powered shoes that it claims can boost walk speeds by up to 250%.

At first glance, Moonwalkers look like a pair of futuristic roller-skates, but there is actually a lot more to them than that. You're actually meant to walk with them the way you would with regular shoes or sneakers, letting the motorized wheels put a spring in your step. Powered by a state-of-the-art brushless DC motor(直流电机), this creative device is actually a platform that can be attached to a wide variety of footwear to significantly increase your walking speed up to a reported 7mph/11kph. For comparison, humans' average walking speed ranges from 2. 5 to 4 mph. The sensation of walking with the world's fastest shoes has been compared to that of walking on a 'moving walkway' in an airport.

Designed by Shift Robotics, an offshoot of Carnegie Mellon University, Moonwalkers consist of a 300W brushless motor in each 4. 2-lb (1. 9-kg) shoe that powers eight polyurethane wheels. There is also an AI-powered gearbox that increases or decreases speed according to data regarding the wearer's walk collected by a series of sensors. The shoes are also able to detect downhill movement to prevent accidents.

"Moonwalkers are not skates. They're shoes. The world's fastest shoes actually," Xunjie Zang, founder and CEO of Shift Robotics said. "You don't skate in them. You walk. You don't have to learn how to use them; the shoes learn from you." But do the world's fastest shoes work on uneven ground, or things like stairs? We all know how tricky those are for rollerskates. Well, apparently the designers took that into consideration and with a simple gesture, the wearer can lock the wheels so that they can walk up or down stairs as they would in regular footwear.

The first batch is expected to ship in March of 2023, at a retail price of $1,399. That's not cheap, but then again, this isn't your average pair of shoes; it's the world's fastest pair of shoes.

According to a study done by University of Michigan researchers, shopping to relieve stress was up to 40 times more effective at giving people a sense of control and shoppers were three times less sad compared to those who only browsed for items.

More than half of the 1,000 consumers participating in the survey said they have impulsively(冲动地) shopped to deal with feelings of stress, anxiety or depression. Twenty-three percent of respondents said they've maxed out a credit card in the past year. Millennials, 68 percent, responded by saying they have stress spent in the past, compared with 53 percent of Gen Xers and only 26 percent of Baby Boomers.

By gender, 48 percent of men and 31 percent of women who have stress spent said they had purchased alcohol when stressed. 82 percent of women stress spent on clothing compared to 52 percent of men. Women also lead stress spending for jewelry, 42 percent, compared to 22 percent for men, with men stress spending more for electronics, 44 percent versus 30 percent for women.

In fact, shopping to reduce stress can actually help you live a healthier life by making sure that your blood pressure is lowered. Shopping to relieve stress is also known as retail therapy(疗法) as a form of regulating stress. The survey found that 82 percent had only positive feelings about their purchases and that the positive mood boost that followed those purchases was long-lasting.

However, the side effect of retail therapy, for many, can start out as a relatively harmless mood booster but could possibly grow into an impulse that uses up money and cause conflict, thereby adding a significant amount of stress to a person's life.

Technology is developing by leaps and bounds. A small device such as a smartphone now has more processing power than rockets to the Moon once had. New tech brings many advantages, making our lives easier and opening up new opportunities. One piece of kit that's been really taking off recently is the drone. This pilotless mini aircraft, originally developed for aerial (航空的) photography and warfare，is now bringing us benefits closer to home. In the last few years, tech companies such as Amazon, Alphabet and Uber have promised us delivery drones-bringing goods to our doorsteps in a matter of minutes. While progress in developing them has been slow, drones are becoming more and more involved in our life.

Drones are helping to connect with and enhance the lives of people in remote locations. In the UK, the Royal Mail wants a fleet of 500 drones to help deliver the mail to faraway communities. Windracers, the company developing the drones, say theycan ny in fog and produce 30% fewer emissions than comparable piloted aircraft. And in Coventry in the UK, construction has started on an air center, which will act as a base for police and delivery drones. Urban-Air Port Limited is working with car-maker Hyundai on the mini-airport, known as a skyport.

Drones can also play a part in improving the health of millions of people. For example, an incredible development project by the University of South Australia is for drones to eventually be able to survey populations for disease by reading the blood oxygen levels of humans from the air. They'll also be able to scan for other vital signs, like coughing and a high temperature.

It seems that the sky is the limit for what drone technology can achieve. The only thing that sometimes keeps it from working is regulation. Writing for the BBC, Jessica Brown says: "If our skies are to become as crowded as our streets, airspace rules need updating to prevent accidents."

According to a recent study, children explore more than adults and it helps then learn better than grown-ups. The study notes when adults attempt something new but get a negative result, they often won't try it again.

Dr. Alison Gopnik, one of the co-authors, said "That might seem like the most base kind of intelligence-even rats stay away fron a path leading to a shock. The downside is that we will never learn the world is more complicated. Children, however, have intense curiosity and drive to explore and this helps them learn many different things and quickly. "

Together with NYU scientist Emily Liquin, Gopnik conducted a scientific experiment to test if young children's drive to explore more than grown-ups influences the way they learn.

They gave 64 young children and 87 adults a game where each placed different blocks on a machine with one rule: If the machine lights up, they get a prize consisting of a star, but if the machine doesn't light up, they lose twice as much. The goal of the game was to discover that all the blocks work except for the ones with white spots.

Most of the children were able to figure out the rule correctly, whereas more than 70% adults couldn't, but it came at a cost: The children earned fewer stars.

The experiment shows adults often leap to faster conclusions, while children are more willing to explore and gather more information before they decide on a result.

The experiment only studied four to seven-year-olds compared to adults in the United States, noting more research is needed to generalize it to a broader population and context, according to the paper.

Gopnik concludes, "We grown-ups are often so anxious to exploit that we don't explore, so afraid of losing stars that we miss the chance to learn something new.

Children, however, are natural explorers, willing to sacrifice stars for the sake of information. We need both types of thinking to grow up, but adults might learn something from those curious kids."

For years, David James, who studies insects at Washington State University, had wanted to examine the migration (迁徙) patterns of West Coast monarch butterflies (黑脉金斑蝶). The route the butterflies travel has been hardly known because the populations are too small to follow. For every 200 monarchs tagged (打标签) by a researcher, only one is usually recovered at the end of its trip, James says, and finding even 200 in the wild to tag is unlikely. Knowing the route is vital to conservation efforts, but James had no way to figure it out—until he got a phone call from Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.

The prison was looking for new activities to improve the mental health of those serving long-term sentences. So James began working with prisoners to raise monarchs through the whole process of their transformation. The adult insects were then tagged and released from the prison. Over five years, nearly 10,000 monarchs flew from the facility. Elsewhere in Washington, Oregon and Idaho, researchers released another few thousand.

The tags included email addresses, and soon after the first butterflies took off, James started receiving messages from people who had spotted them. The butterflies, the reports confirmed, wintered in coastal California. Twelve of them landed at Lighthouse Field State Beach in Santa Cruz. Several more headed to Bolinas and Morro Bay.

The work helps researchers identify ideal places to plant milkweed and other vegetation that are important to the life cycle of West Coast monarch butterflies. It also brought out the gentler side of some of the prisoners. "They were very worried that they were going to harm the butterflies," James says. Watching the monarch change their form also touched the men. "This butterfly changed," James recalls prisoners telling him, "and maybe we can too."

We all know that unpleasant feeling when we're talking about something interesting and halfway through our sentence we're interrupted. But was that really an interruption? The answer depends on whom you ask, according to new research led by Katherine Hilton from Stanford University.

Using a set of controlled audio clips (录音片段), Hilton surveyed 5,000 American English speakers to better understand what affects people's perceptions of interruptions. She had participants listen to audio clips and then answer questions about whether the speakers seemed to be friendly and engaged, listening to one another, or trying to interrupt.

Hilton found that American English speakers have different conversational styles. She identified two distinct groups: high and low intensity speakers. High intensity speakers are generally uncomfortable with moments of silence in conversation and consider talking at the same time a sign of engagement. Low intensity speakers find it rude to talk at the same time and prefer people speak one after another in conversation.

The differences in conversational styles became evident when participants listened to audio clips in which two people spoke at the same time but were agreeing with each other and stayed on topic, Hilton said. The high intensity group reported that conversations where people spoke at the same time when expressing agreement were not interruptive but engaged and friendlier than the conversations with moments of silence in between speaking turns. In contrast, the low intensity group perceived any amount of simultaneous (同时) chat as a rude interruption, regardless of what the speakers were saying.

"People care about being interrupted, and those small interruptions can have a massive effect on the overall communication," Hilton said. "Breaking apart what an interruption means is essential if we want to understand how humans interact with each other."